Archive

In the past you saw inter­na­tion­al and nation­al stan­dard­iza­tion of very well‐defined tech­nolo­gies. For exam­ple, if you were going to build nuts and bolts, what the threads look like, and you know, with the prop­er spac­ing and height and grip and so on. And so you know, this is not rock­et sci­ence. It’s crit­i­cal­ly impor­tant to an engineer’s infra­struc­ture to have stan­dard­iza­tion of these things, but it’s not as if we are try­ing to some­how cod­i­fy the laws of physics.

People are amazed at the growth of the Web, but the growth of the Internet, that was actu­al­ly what hap­pened from zero. So the things that you guys have done from this have been the way that we have learned.

We’ve already been through sev­er­al sit­u­a­tions where new tech­nolo­gies come along. The Industrial Revolution removed a large num­ber of jobs that had been done by hand, replaced them with machines. But the machines had to be built, the machines had to be oper­at­ed, the machines had to be main­tained. And the same is true in this online envi­ron­ment.

We’re at a thou­sand dol­lars per giga­byte, which is what cur­rent disk dri­ves cost. The twen­ty ter­abytes that peo­ple esti­mate in ASCII that’s in the Library of Congress is just twen­ty mil­lion dol­lars. So that’s not very much mon­ey in terms of being able to store and retrieve [crosstalk] the Library of Congress.

One of the ways that indus­tri­al rev­o­lu­tions are inter­est­ing to think about is that they look dif­fer­ent­ly depend­ing on how and where you see them from. They look dif­fer­ent whether you see them from Europe or Asia or Africa. But regard­less of time or place, econ­o­mists and his­to­ri­ans gen­er­al­ly tend to look at indus­tri­al rev­o­lu­tions through the lens of inno­va­tion. And in my short talk today I want to encour­age a dif­fer­ent way of think­ing about this.

I want­ed to give you a lit­tle bit of per­spec­tive on Otlet’s broad­er vision, which I think is in a way even more inter­est­ing as a ref­er­ence point for think­ing about some of the changes we’re see­ing today as our lives are increas­ing­ly reshaped by tech­nol­o­gy and net­works. What Otlet offers is a dif­fer­ent way into that space, and a dif­fer­ent way of think­ing about what a net­worked world could look like.